aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Thursday, April 26, 2007

Making media is hard to do

I agreed with it when I read it. Kyte.tv sent me back to quote it. A bored Kevin Drum on why v-logging kind of sucks:

...in reverse order of importance.

1. The first objection is the most obvious one: it’s so slo-o-o-o-w. A 20-minute v-log usually contains remarkably little content amidst all the interruptions, verbal tics, and hemming and hawing. I prefer my bloviating in more concentrated form. On a related note, v-logs are also almost impossible to scan, which I find endlessly annoying. I can scan a 3,000 word article in little more than a minute or so if I’m looking for a particular passage.

2. V-loggers tend not to think out their arguments very well before turning on the camera, which means that I usually have to sit and watch for 20 minutes as they slowly and painfully piece it together. On a purely selfish basis, I’d rather that they spend the time it takes to hone their argument and write it down in a form where I can read it quickly, instead of blathering aimlessly and forcing me to spend the time to pick out the wheat from the chaff.

3. Finally, I just don’t get it. There’s a reason political blogging has become popular: it’s a genuinely different medium compared to other forms of political writing. Its combination of short takes, easy hyperlinking, interactivity (with other blogs and with blog commenters), constant updating, and accessibility by ordinary writers makes it unique. You can do things with a blog that you just can’t do on an op-ed page or a magazine, and that’s inherent in the medium.

V-logging, by contrast, is just TV. It’s literally the same thing that you see on PBS or CNN or Fox, except less professional. It just doesn’t bring anything new to the table.

As good a time as ever to quote Sturgeon’s Law, “Ninety percent of everything is crud.” (Does anyone know the coinage of its corollary, “one man’s garbage is another man’s treasure?") As we slam user generated content, let’s keep in mind what the content industry has given us. I expect the ratio of good to bad from YouAndMe TV to be just as good.